Babyish orthography
Babyish orthography is the standard way of recording Babyish languages. It includes the representation of phonemes by letters, as well as the correct spelling rules. It is the formal and recommended way to spell and write Babyish. Babyish uses alphabets. Babyish has its own characters, being some geometric shapes, but was not used beyond illustration. It is transcripted in two ways: * accented Latin characters * plain ASCII text (for transcription only) The spelling of Babyish is basically morpho-phonemic, that is, phonetic in practice with some occasions of exceptional due to historical reasons. History of Babyish When Babyish started to record as text, it happened to be in mixed mode. That is, a mixture of Chinese characters and English text. Sometimes, Han characters with similar look of characters of similar sound are invented to record concepts and characters no available in their daily Cantonese usage. At early 1980s, there is a problem of whether the term “Babyish” refers to the Chinese language variation, or the English language variation. The two languages was once referred to as “Babyish Chinese” and “Babyish English”. Later, the “Babyish Chinese” was simply referred as simply “Chinese” and the “Babyish English” was referred as “Babyish”. This is because speakers of “Babyish English” are no longer native speakers of English, but including people from all around the world. At that time, “Babyish” has become the langua franca of all races. At that time, as the Babyish language become stabilized, orthography rules can then developed. Influences of computerization The orthography of Babyish depends highly on the way to record the language. At early time, only typewriters are available. Therefore, all letters shall be able to type by a typewriter. Spelling rules followed the same as English spelling. “Ö” and “Ü”, if such sound appears (like “öre”), are represented by the combination of double quotation mark (") and the plain letter. “Ç” is done by combining the comma (,) with “C”. “Ŋ”, “Đ” and “Ŧ” are represented as digraph, like “ng”, “dh / th” and “th”. “Ř” is done by combing the “R” with a shifted lower-case “v”. Long vowels are represented by combining the vowel with a shifted minus (−) sign. Loan words from Chinese do not have their tones marked. Chinese characters are hand-written. Since the English spelling is rather irregular, there are proposals to move to phonetic transcription. Then, people need a way to represent all phonetic values. “Ä” is introduced to the character set to present both /æ/ and /ɛ/ sound. As the English spoken by most people at that time have a very strong accent, the “-er” suffix is recorded as “ā” sound. There is a problem of whether to keep “Ç” or change them all to “s” instead. Computers started to appear in Babycasèny since 1979, but they are not common. All computers are Apple-II compatibles. Printers are also not common. At that time, only English are used in computers. Sometimes, sppecial characters are converted to digraph if Babyish is needed to use. When the first printer and PC-compatible computers are imported to Babycasèny from the Earth at 1985, efforts are made to let the printer printing Babyish. Display units with default codepage 437 can show a lot more characters than computers used to be able to do. Printers at that time can switch to use different character set. Spanish is most frequently used, as it can print the most special characters. There is a move to use extended characters available on scrren to represent characters not representable with similar sound. For example, “Ŋ” is represented as “Ñ”. Later, people found that the extended characters in graphics mode of CGA adapters and printers can be customized, but the implementation was not complete and thus not successful. WordPerfect 5.1 (pirate version) started to come to market in 1990. The software is able to store extended characters and have the displayed in a special 512-characters mode if attached to a VGA adapter. The selection of such 512-characters are not arbitary, but pre-defined by WordPerfect. When the hardcopy of the definition of Unicode base mapping plan comes to Babycasèny in 1993, it was believed to be the future way to represent Babyish text precisely. Although it was promised to be supported by Windows 95 from Microsoft, the Unicode functionality was never available until Windows NT 4.0 and Office 2000 is available. Writing system * Punctuation: The punctuation of Babyish is the same as English. * Spelling: * Collation: There are two kinds of collation sequence in Babyish: ** English: Alphabetical order, unaccented characters first. ** Chinese: bpmf order * Capitalisation: same as English * Lettercase: ** Masculine (le) ** Feminine (la) ** Neuter (đe) ** Honour (o'') History of Spelling Efforts had been made to make the transcription of the language precise. Therefore, letters with lots of diacritics were employed to record the language precisely. Originally, text are all written, and there is little problem about the writing. The only problem is to have an agreed way to transcript the same sound. Technological changes contribute to the adoptation of alphabets. Early DOS-based computers support only Code page 437, and most characters need to choose among the represented characters. However, due to the misunderstanding and insufficient knowledge acquired by the users, different writing forms are adopted in different period. For example, the letter "Ñ" used to represent the /ŋ/ sound. However, the letter was later known to represent the ny sound in Spanish instead. At that time, computer technology has become more convenient for users to use Unicode characters. Therefore, the letter "ŋ" was selected to replace the original usage of "ñ". Competition between old spelling and new spelling Although there are many efforts paid to formalize the spelling, most people still write in the form of English, or use their own spelling. Therefore, some common spelling has become a norm instead. For example, "Xiongmiao" (Panda or taking a shower) shall be written as "Siongmiao" in the formalized spelling. Mordern Spelling Morphological principle '''Morphological principles' are the principles of word formations. There are prefixes, suffices, infixes and other preposition in Babyish. These suffices may be native to the language, or they are borrowed from other languages. See also * Babyish Calligraphy * Russian orthography Category:Babyish languages Category:Orthography